Survey Design

This is part 1 of a 5 part series on Survey Design.

There are many sources of data you can use to make decisions, ranging from financial reports to customer analytics. However, these will only tell you what your customers are doing, not what they are thinking. If you want to know what your customers are thinking, you need to ask them!

In-person interviews are the best forum, but you can only meet with so many customers given how much time it takes. Hence, sending surveys to your customers is the standard method of soliciting input from your customers. You can easily ask questions of hundreds or thousands of customers and gather their answers with a minimal amount of effort.

However, surveys are tricky! Depending on the questions you ask, which customers you ask and when you ask them you may get wildly different results. Just gathering data is not enough, you need to be thoughtful in designing your survey and in how you interpret the results.

This week we’ll cover survey design by using the Data Driven Survey as our example! There are currently 2,532 subscribers to the Data Driven Daily and 46 of you responded to the survey which is a 1.8% response rate. That might sound low but that is actually much higher than most surveys will receive, which is one of the many problems we’ll review this week.

Special thanks to each of the 46 people who took the time to respond to the Data Driven Survey!

Quote of the Day: “Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.” – Voltaire